US News

CNN's Anderson Cooper was amazed on Monday after he realized a pardoned rioter who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection may have predicted that he would eventually get a payoff from the Trump administration.

Cooper recounted the case against Edward Kelly, who was one of the first rioters to breach the Capitol that day, and another rioter named Andrew Paul Johnson. Kelly was convicted in 2024 for plotting to kill the FBI agents who investigated him after Jan. 6, and is serving a life sentence for those crimes.

President Donald Trump privately demanded that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough.

According to NOTUS, "President Donald Trump pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian after she ruled Republicans could not include funding for the president’s ballroom in a budget bill, two sources familiar with the request told NOTUS." However, Thune is adamantly refusing to get rid of MacDonough, who was first appointed as the Senate rules referee in 2012 and has often frustrated majorities in both parties.

Megyn Kelly isn't buying what the Trump administration is selling on Cuba — and she's mincing no words.

The conservative host used her Monday podcast to torch the administration over a weekend Axios report claiming Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and discussed attacking Guantanamo Bay, US naval vessels, and Key West.

A legal expert ripped the Supreme Court for "beclowning itself" after some of the justices entertained MAGA rage-bait during a recent oral argument session.

Steve Vladek, a law professor at Georgetown University, said during the most recent episode of "The Court of History" podcast on the Legal AF Network that some of the court's justices seemed to be more focused on policy issues than interpreting the statutory question at hand in a case called Watson v. R.N.C. The case is about whether federal election law permits mail-in ballots from being counted after election day, and the Supreme Court's decision could have a major impact on the upcoming midterm elections.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell fired back Monday after the New York Times filed its second lawsuit against the Defense Department in five months, claiming the paper simply wants to get its hands on classified information — and reporters who cover the building immediately returned fire.

Parnell posted on X that the Times' lawsuit, which challenges a requirement that journalists be escorted at all times while inside the Pentagon, was "nothing more than an attempt to remove the barriers to them getting their hands on classified information," adding that reporters want "to roam the halls of the Pentagon freely and without an escort — a privilege that they do not have in any other federal building."

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria was met with a screaming heckler before he could start talking at Monday evening's press conference on the deadly shooting at the Islamic Center, which is currently being investigated as a hate crime.

"This is a [expletive] direct result of your leadership!" shouted the heckler. "Our Muslim brothers and sisters have been talking to you for how long? You haven't [expletive] listened to them, Todd. Just like you did with ICE."

President Donald Trump's "Rededicate 250" event on Sunday was the latest example of how the administration is willingly crossing a bright red line as it takes an ax to a central American value, according to one expert.

Robert Jones, who has been studying and writing about political extremism for more than two decades, argued in a new essay for his Substack, "Redeeming Democracy," that the prayer event was a "deflating" example of how the Trump administration is working to undo the separation between church and state, which is one of America's foundational ideals. He described the event as being packed with "theocratic distortions" designed to blend the extremist religious views of the speakers with the iconography of the U.S. Capitol.

President Donald Trump's hometown of New York City is reminding the public of just how closely tied he is to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a new stunt.

According to The Daily Beast, an art gallery in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan "was transformed into the 'Donald J. Trump & Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,' where every document the federal government has released related to Epstein — arguably the country’s most infamous pedophile — can be found. The free installation will close on May 20, but not without a theatrical farewell."

A former senior National Security Council official is warning that President Donald Trump's Beijing summit left Americans dangerously exposed, and that, unlike Richard Nixon's historic China opening, this one will have consequences that can't be undone.

" Trump is getting away with this move politically. Geopolitically, he will not. His new stance imperils Americans and emboldens China, which makes a future crisis likelier than ever," wrote Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who served as NSC strategic planning director under Biden, in a new Atlantic essay.

The New York Times filed a new lawsuit challenging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's press access policy — and going into extensive detail, using an emoji to indicate the clear intent of the policy was to silence freedom of the press.

The policy effectively neutered Pentagon reporters by forcing them, as a condition of receiving Pentagon Facility Alternate Credentials (PFACs), to agree not to publish anything that was the product of leaks from within the administration — something even the vast majority of right-wing outlets refused to agree to.

Onlookers were shocked on Monday after a new image of President Donald Trump's bruised hand began circulating on social media.

Trump has consistently downplayed the bruising on his hands, often suggesting it is from all the handshakes he gives to supporters and political dignitaries. The president has also tried to hide the bruising on his hand by plastering it with makeup. But a new image of Trump's hand during a health care affordability event at the White House sparked fresh health concerns.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told a room full of top Republican donors Monday that he expects his party to net seven to eight additional House seats through mid-decade redistricting, a bullish prediction that signals how aggressively the GOP plans to redraw the map heading into the midterms.

Johnson made the remarks on a panel at his big-donor retreat in Washington alongside National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson and Congressional Leadership Fund president Chris Winkelman, according to a source in the room, per Punchbowl News.

One of President Donald Trump's ambassadors has been linked to a scandal-ridden movement in Canada because of his involvement with a right-wing voting group, according to a new report.

Pete Hoekstra, Trump's ambassador to Canada, has been linked to a separatist group in Alberta that has coordinated with a right-wing group in Michigan called 10xVotes for more than a year, PressProgress reported on Monday. The separatist group, known as the Centurion Project, is under investigation by Canadian authorities after it obtained private information about more than 3 million Alberta voters. A lawyer recently told the CBC that the data breach is one of the “the most significant privacy incidents” in Canadian history.